Journal ArticleDOI
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
TLDR
It is argued that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation and how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience is suggested.Abstract:
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN) . FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The origin of human multi-modal communication
TL;DR: It becomes apparent that human communication has a layered structure, where the layers may be plausibly assigned different phylogenetic and evolutionary origins—especially in the light of recent thoughts on the emergence of voluntary breathing and spoken language.
Journal ArticleDOI
Statistical computations over a speech stream in a rodent
Juan M. Toro,Josep B. Trobalon +1 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that rats can segment the streams using the frequency of co-occurrence (not transitional probabilities, as human infants do) among items, showing that some basic statistical learning mechanism generalizes over nonprimate species.
Journal ArticleDOI
Neurobiological roots of language in primate audition: common computational properties.
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky,Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky,Matthias Schlesewsky,Steven L. Small,Josef P. Rauschecker +4 more
TL;DR: It is argued that higher- order language combinatorics, including sentence and discourse processing, can be situated in a unified, cross-species dorsal-ventral streams architecture for higher auditory processing, and that the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams in higher-order language processing can be grounded in their respective computational properties in primate audition.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functionally referential signals: a promising paradigm whose time has passed.
Brandon C. Wheeler,Julia Fischer +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that the concept of functional reference has outlived its usefulness and become a red herring in the pursuit of the links between primate communication and human language.
Journal ArticleDOI
The mystery of language evolution
Marc D. Hauser,Charles Yang,Robert C. Berwick,Ian Tattersall,Michael J. Ryan,Jeffrey Watumull,Noam Chomsky,Richard C Lewontin +7 more
TL;DR: It is submitted that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of the authors' linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Ann S. Ferebee,Noam Chomsky +1 more
TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.
Book
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
Book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles are presented. But the authors focus on the secondary sexual characteristics of fishes and amphibians rather than the primary sexual characters.
Book
The Minimalist Program
TL;DR: This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."
Journal Article
The descent of man and selection in relation to sex: documento
TL;DR: Part I. Sexual Selection (continued): Secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles, and secondarySexual characters of birds.